Thai fruit wine, new name for all wines in Thailand to reduce tax ?

[xylophone]

4 minutes ago, craigt3365 said:

Excellent point.  Sometimes eggs are added and that could be dangerous to people who are allergic to them.

 

As it happens egg whites are often used to clarify grape wines so we've been consuming that for years, so I can only assume that it doesn't affect people who are allergic to eggs??

 

Quote, "Before a wine is bottled, a winemaker might want to remove excess tannins or solids in a process called “fining.” The proteins in egg whites, milk, fish bladders, seaweed or volcanic clay are known to attract and bind to these tannins or solids, which then clump together and fall out of suspension to the bottom of a barrel or tank. Then the wine is then typically “racked,” or moved to another container, leaving behind the sediment and fining agent.

If you’re vegan or suffer from severe egg, milk or fish allergies, I wouldn’t blame you for avoiding these wines altogether, even if there’s currently no significant evidence that the fining agents remain".

[AbeSurd]

1 hour ago, overherebc said:

Not really wine though is it?

It's the right colour

[overherebc]

6 minutes ago, AbeSurd said:

It's the right colour

Right colour and wet. After that not much else like wine.

??

[sandyf]

On 2/19/2017 at 2:58 PM, Jerry787 said:

well from the winery the wine need to be shipped to a export port, get an export document, from there shipped to Thailand, clear importa tax, duty and what ever gov fee required, then the importer shall make a profit in order to exist.

 

There is a vineyard and winery at Silverlake, their wines are upwards of 1200 baht.

[craigt3365]

1 hour ago, sandyf said:

There is a vineyard and winery at Silverlake, their wines are upwards of 1200 baht.

And worth about 1/4 of that price. If that.

[nisakiman]

4 hours ago, overherebc said:

Right colour and wet. After that not much else like wine.

??

And alcoholic. Let's not forget alcoholic!

[xylophone]

On 2/20/2017 at 7:37 AM, abab said:

 

 

Seems to be real ?

 

https://www.wineconnection.co.th/buy-wine-online/red-wine/birchgrove-r.html

 

Other cheap bottles have FRUIT WINE written in the description.

 

 

Popped into Wine Connection to look at this Birchgrove wine and sure enough on the back label and printed off to one side are the words "fruit wine" so it has had fruit juice added to it.

 

I thought they might have found a way to bring in a cheap Aussie swigger from the Riverina, but it seems not, so quite how Tesco Lotus manage to do it with their "World of Wines" range is a mystery, unless somewhere hidden away are the words "fruit wine"!!!

[xylophone]

7 hours ago, Jai Dee said:

Back in Oz you would only ever buy Jacob's Creek if having a BBQ with your mates and their families.

Never for the table.

I think that was the case a few years ago, this especially when the Jacob's Creek wine that was so prevalent in those days was actually a non-vintage wine (blended from a couple of vintages/years, for example) and it was blended to a particular and popular taste and every time you bought a bottle of Jacob's Creek, you know exactly what you were getting, much like the way non-vintage champagne is made. In a nutshell, this was a wine made to a price.

 

Fast forward to present day and you have a whole range of Jacob's Creek wines from individual grape varieties and also from different and prominent regions, and some of these are priced accordingly as in the "Reserve Range" for example, and you also have Jacob's Creek wine from Coonawarra and so on and these are getting towards their premium range.

 

I have tried one of these and was not that impressed, but it was definitely a big cut above the everyday drinking Jacob's Creek that I had known from my earlier days.

 

So these days, Jacob's Creek have produced wines which are meant to grace dinner tables and complement good food........... having said that, I still think there are better value wines around.

[superal]

3 hours ago, xylophone said:

I think that was the case a few years ago, this especially when the Jacob's Creek wine that was so prevalent in those days was actually a non-vintage wine (blended from a couple of vintages/years, for example) and it was blended to a particular and popular taste and every time you bought a bottle of Jacob's Creek, you know exactly what you were getting, much like the way non-vintage champagne is made. In a nutshell, this was a wine made to a price.

 

Fast forward to present day and you have a whole range of Jacob's Creek wines from individual grape varieties and also from different and prominent regions, and some of these are priced accordingly as in the "Reserve Range" for example, and you also have Jacob's Creek wine from Coonawarra and so on and these are getting towards their premium range.

 

I have tried one of these and was not that impressed, but it was definitely a big cut above the everyday drinking Jacob's Creek that I had known from my earlier days.

 

So these days, Jacob's Creek have produced wines which are meant to grace dinner tables and complement good food........... having said that, I still think there are better value wines around.

Sorry Pal , it's me again , just got to say JC is a real wine ? so out here in Thailand we know we are drinking wine with J/C  , whether it suits your palate is another thing  . Busting to say this and I am sure you have seen similar on tele but so called wine snobs have lined up with 5 or 6 wines in front of them and then give their opinions of the dearest and cheapest , never seen them get it right and many elected for a cheap supermarket own brand at a fraction of the cost of others they are sampling . I reckon that sometimes wine lovers are taken in by what is written on the bottle and are trying to identify with the describe bouquet / nose .

    I know you will come back at me but have to say some good info on this discussion .

[overherebc]

41 minutes ago, superal said:

Sorry Pal , it's me again , just got to say JC is a real wine ? so out here in Thailand we know we are drinking wine with J/C  , whether it suits your palate is another thing  . Busting to say this and I am sure you have seen similar on tele but so called wine snobs have lined up with 5 or 6 wines in front of them and then give their opinions of the dearest and cheapest , never seen them get it right and many elected for a cheap supermarket own brand at a fraction of the cost of others they are sampling . I reckon that sometimes wine lovers are taken in by what is written on the bottle and are trying to identify with the describe bouquet / nose .

    I know you will come back at me but have to say some good info on this discussion .

What you say is true. It all boils down to what you enjoy drinking. 

Can remember a UK wine expert discussing a French wine with the producer and asking if there would be a preferred shape of glass to drink the wine from and the guy answered 'yes, one that is open at the top'.

We used to enjoy Kiwi whites but now reckon they always taste too much of apple nowadays, even good Brancott wines.

Any drink what you enjoy.

???

[rickudon]

On 2/20/2017 at 0:03 AM, abab said:

Peter Vella and Castle Creek, both with Mont clair are some of the wines that I will never drink again even for free. You really know nothing about wine and really have no taste, right ?

No, have a taste, just not as finnicky as yours. I know crap when i taste it, and i have had far worse than Peter vella in 'real' wine. I have paid 10 pound plus in the UK SOMETIMES but was such wine noticeably better than a 5 pound bottle? Usually, no. Would i buy Peter Vella in the UK? Probably not, but I'm in Thailand and retired on a modest pension. I'm not going to pay 500 baht for a wine worth a fraction of the price - plus i have bought 'proper' wine here which has gone off, not a kind climate for wine. I don't do dinner parties. Barbeques etc, yes. I don't care if it has fruit in it, as long as it tastes ok. I used to make fruit wines (without grape juice) in the UK sometimes, still wine.

[nisakiman]

What Superal says is very true - there is a lot of wine snobbery and people are very influenced by the label. And I admit to having been persuaded myself that a wine is better than it actually is by its provenance. Blind tasting is the only way to sort wines out, and even that isn't 100% reliable, as the flavour and nose of a wine can be heavily influenced by temperature, decanting or both.

 

I'm no longer impressed by price or provenance when buying bottled wine (my daily drink, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is a 2013 Merlot that comes out of a 10 litre box, and costs me less than €20 a box), and usually opt for an Argentinian or Chilian wine, as they give more bangs for the buck than the local (Greek) wines. That's not to say that the local wines can't be excellent, they can; but in terms of value for money, the South American wines beat the rest. And I say that as a real fan of Aussie wines. But they (the Aussies) are sadly pricing themselves out of the (or at least my) market. If I can buy an excellent Argentinian Syrah for €8, and a similar quality Australian is €12, the Australian stays on the shelf and the Argentinian goes in the basket.

[xylophone]

2 hours ago, superal said:

Sorry Pal , it's me again , just got to say JC is a real wine ? so out here in Thailand we know we are drinking wine with J/C  , whether it suits your palate is another thing  . Busting to say this and I am sure you have seen similar on tele but so called wine snobs have lined up with 5 or 6 wines in front of them and then give their opinions of the dearest and cheapest , never seen them get it right and many elected for a cheap supermarket own brand at a fraction of the cost of others they are sampling . I reckon that sometimes wine lovers are taken in by what is written on the bottle and are trying to identify with the describe bouquet / nose .

    I know you will come back at me but have to say some good info on this discussion .

J C is a real wine from grapes from a respected Aussie producer, just that they have produced more upmarket versions over the years with the cheapest here being around 559 baht and an ok drinker at that.

 

There's a difference between "wine snobs" and the experts and there are some experts who can not only tell you the grape variety, but the country and the region from whence it came, but even they get it wrong sometimes!! Then of course there is the famous "Judgement of Paris" in 1976 where mainly french wine tasters, in a blind tasting, voted some Californian wines ahead of their esteemed French entries.......the winning white being Ch Montelena from the Napa valley.

 

So it is an imprecise science at best........but I know what suits my taste buds and that's all that matters.

 

Sure some folk get taken in by what is on the label, but for me, as soon as I try it I can tell a few things about it..........mostly, do I like it!! If I don't then I put it down to a learning experience and won't buy it again.

 

Lastly some of the supermarkets hire experts to select their own brand wines so although they can be cheap some of them are excellent value....worthwhile remembering!

 

[xylophone]

8 hours ago, nisakiman said:

as the flavour and nose of a wine can be heavily influenced by temperature, decanting or both.

That is certainly very true here in Thailand where the temperature is not usually conducive to allowing a red wine to show its best features and not only that, the storage here leaves a lot to be desired, thereby ageing a wine much more quickly.

 

The long and the short of it is that we all have different tastes and what seems like a great wine to one person, won't to another, not only that it very much depends upon what one has gotten used to over the years and never has that been more evident than when I was touring France with my wine merchant friend and we stayed at Château la Bastide, where he and his wife put on a lovely dinner.

 

As a gift we took along a bottle of 1996 Penfolds Grange and of course he provided us with wine from his vineyard (which by the way I like) so I was interested in hearing what he would have to say about one of Australia's finest wines. Well he didn't like it because it was too fruit driven, not complex enough and fairly one-dimensional!

 

Of course I was astounded because it is a good wine, there is doubt about it, however he and most other Frenchmen have been brought up sampling the wines of their area and they grow to like them over time and anything outside of that particular style, seems alien to them. The description of the Grange was that it was like being hit in the face with a shovel full of fruit – – an assault of heavy fruit on the senses with no nuance or grace to it......... and thinking about it I can understand it and I can name a lot of Aussie wines like that, and indeed some from South America and other places. Having said that, I do like the majority of them and perhaps I'm lucky that way with my taste buds?

 

That example is where folks are used to the wines that they have become accustomed to and grown to like. Another example is where taste buds are just totally different and I had a situation here where friends were tasting different wines at a restaurant and one of the wines was quite obviously "off" – – a young drinking red wine which was far too long in the bottle, standing upright in the sunshine and had taken on the hew of a pale rose and I suggested before it was opened that it was not going to be a good wine and sure enough it wasn't. In fact it was very much like an oxidised dry and bitter sherry and for me and most others round the table it was undrinkable, BUT two of the attendees thought it was okay and proceeded to drink it.......different tastes, different taste buds, and as has often been said, "there's no accounting for taste".

 

My main point here is that we can all come onto threads saying that this wine is better than that wine, this country produces better wines than this country and so on, however it really is all down to taste and one's preference and of course in some cases where cost is involved, this has to be taken into consideration, especially here.

 

So drink what you like, even if it does have fruit juice in it and you are okay with that, however I will suggest that trying and sampling different wines from different grape varieties, from different producers and in different countries will sometimes turn up a wine that will surprise you!

 

 

Edited February 22, 2017 by xylophone

[craigt3365]

3 minutes ago, xylophone said:

That is certainly very true here in Thailand where the temperature is not usually conducive to allowing a red wine to show its best features and not only that, the storage here leaves a lot to be desired, thereby ageing a wine much more quickly.

 

 

I use to live in Vegas, which sometimes, has about the same temp as here.  My favorite shop for wine had a big sign on the front door.  Basically saying one hour in a hot car will kill the wine.  I doubt most wine here is kept in refrigerated containers from source to store.  A few guarantee it, including Central.  With stickers on bottles that they guarantee.

[sandyf]

15 hours ago, craigt3365 said:

And worth about 1/4 of that price. If that.

I will take your opinion on that but I fail to see how anyone can actually say what a wine is worth.

Many moons ago my ex father in law bought me a very expensive bottle of spatlese, I had to spit it out, absolutely worthless to me.

[craigt3365]

17 minutes ago, sandyf said:

I will take your opinion on that but I fail to see how anyone can actually say what a wine is worth.

Many moons ago my ex father in law bought me a very expensive bottle of spatlese, I had to spit it out, absolutely worthless to me.

I think the basis of this thread is wine is massively over priced here.  This one is a perfect example of that.

 

I've also had some very expensive wine that I didn't think was worth the price.  It was very good wine, but not worth the price.  I've had some cheap wine that was OK, but definitely worth the price!

[superal]

18 minutes ago, craigt3365 said:

 

I use to live in Vegas, which sometimes, has about the same temp as here.  My favorite shop for wine had a big sign on the front door.  Basically saying one hour in a hot car will kill the wine.  I doubt most wine here is kept in refrigerated containers from source to store.  A few guarantee it, including Central.  With stickers on bottles that they guarantee.

I have to say that I keep my red wine in the fridge here in Thailand  and could not imagine drinking it at room temperature . A local farang bar would sell the Peter Vella off the shelf saying it should be drank at room temp .  He has to be wrong as I seem to remember that there is an optimum temp; for white and red to be at its best for taste .  The French , Spanish , Italians etc raise and keep their wines in cool cellars for a reason ? right or wrong ?

[craigt3365]

1 minute ago, superal said:

I have to say that I keep my red wine in the fridge here in Thailand  and could not imagine drinking it at room temperature . A local farang bar would sell the Peter Vella off the shelf saying it should be drank at room temp .  He has to be wrong as I seem to remember that there is an optimum temp; for white and red to be at its best for taste .  The French , Spanish , Italians etc raise and keep their wines in cool cellars for a reason ? right or wrong ?

It is probably proper to drink wine at room temp.  But, if it's an open air place, then that's definitely not true here where temps can hit 40C! LOL

 

Keeping wine in a refrig is OK.  Snobs will argue this, but for the wines we drink, it's fine.  I keep mine in the refrig, but take them out and let them warm up before drinking. 

[xylophone]

25 minutes ago, craigt3365 said:

 

I use to live in Vegas, which sometimes, has about the same temp as here.  My favorite shop for wine had a big sign on the front door.  Basically saying one hour in a hot car will kill the wine.  I doubt most wine here is kept in refrigerated containers from source to store.  A few guarantee it, including Central.  With stickers on bottles that they guarantee.

Yes it's the heat more than anything else, or I should qualify that by saying it's the temperature range which can age a wine very fast, i.e. going from cool to hot constantly.

 

Most of the wine I buy at the moment has the same as you say, stickers on the bottles stating that the wine has been in a temperature controlled environment etc.

 

I know where your favourite wine shop was coming from with regards to his sign on the door, although it's probably a bit of hyperbole in order to ensure that the wine you buy gets home quickly, because an hour in a hot car won't damage the wine irreparably, unless of course it boils!!

 

Good on him for bringing the heat aspect to the purchaser's attention – – good customer service.

[xylophone]

As regards the best temperature to drink wine here, and I am only referring to red wines, well it has to vary because of the temperature we have in this country, but like superal has said, I keep my wines in a chiller and sometimes in the fridge and take them out up to half and I before drinking and that way I believe I get the best out of them.

 

The old saying that red wine should be drunk at room temperature was coined to take into consideration the fact that "room temperature" varied somewhat but was loosely applied to those wines drunk in the UK and France, so that temperature would be on average around 20° C, give or take a few degrees and my wine here will be drunk around 22 to 24° C, this after taking it out of the fridge and sometimes decanting it.

 

Drinking red wine above those temperatures can lead to all sorts of "difficulties" with the tasting of it because the heat brings out the "volatile aromas" and doesn't allow the wine to show off its best attributes.

[xylophone]

With a bit of time on my hands I decided to look back over this thread and there are some things which are mentioned a few times and these include, taste, wine snobs, wine experts and so on and in one post I did mention that the tasting of wine, in my opinion, was an imprecise science, and something I just remembered could add weight to this...........

 

As most of you will know, in France a couple of the most prized regions are Bordeaux and Burgundy and wines from those regions have fetched high prices for decades, if not centuries, however what is probably not known is that at one time wines from the Rhône (southern France) would be shipped north to be added to those wines, this especially in times of poor harvests and where the wines lacked backbone. Of course this was "sacrilege" for the purists, however there were many wines produced like that and as often as not, even the "experts" could not determine the fact.

 

It's not an isolated incident as wines from the South of Italy (especially the Negroamaro and Primitivo grapes) would also be shipped north to be added to some premium Italian wines, where they also lacked backbone due to a poor harvest.

 

And there were grapes grown in North Africa, from both French and Italian sources and wines from these grapes would also be shipped to the respective countries to be added to wines in poor vintages.

 

So, the wine experts, wine buyers, the collectors and the everyday drinking public were often fooled by this practice and none of them seemed to be able to tell that this had happened – – quite possibly because of the skill of the blender.

 

So it is an imprecise science indeed!

[Jai Dee]

On 2/22/2017 at 0:37 AM, xylophone said:

Then of course there is the famous "Judgement of Paris" in 1976 where mainly french wine tasters, in a blind tasting, voted some Californian wines ahead of their esteemed French entries.......the winning white being Ch Montelena from the Napa valley.

They made a film about it... Bottle Shock.

Quite an entertaining movie.

 

 

[xylophone]

8 minutes ago, Jai Dee said:

They made a film about it... Bottle Shock.

Quite an entertaining movie.

 

 

I thought so too...........a nice "feel-good" movie AND I saw a bottle of Ch Montelena the other day in Villa Market and was tempted to buy it, but not a white wine drinker as a rule!

[Jai Dee]

2 minutes ago, xylophone said:

... but not a white wine drinker as a rule!

And you call yourself " a wine enthusiast and longtime collector (and unfortunately/fortunately drinker) ???

 

You're missing out... your glass is only half full!

[xylophone]

3 minutes ago, Jai Dee said:

And you call yourself " a wine enthusiast and longtime collector (and unfortunately/fortunately drinker) ???

 

You're missing out... your glass is only half full!

True enough JD, but stick to reds unless have the very occasional glass of white with an entree.......and I hate to say it but I've never found a white which sends me into raptures such as many reds do.

 

Maybe I should say that I am a RED WINE enthusiast only............!!!!!

[craigt3365]

1 hour ago, xylophone said:

With a bit of time on my hands I decided to look back over this thread and there are some things which are mentioned a few times and these include, taste, wine snobs, wine experts and so on and in one post I did mention that the tasting of wine, in my opinion, was an imprecise science, and something I just remembered could add weight to this...........

 

As most of you will know, in France a couple of the most prized regions are Bordeaux and Burgundy and wines from those regions have fetched high prices for decades, if not centuries, however what is probably not known is that at one time wines from the Rhône (southern France) would be shipped north to be added to those wines, this especially in times of poor harvests and where the wines lacked backbone. Of course this was "sacrilege" for the purists, however there were many wines produced like that and as often as not, even the "experts" could not determine the fact.

 

It's not an isolated incident as wines from the South of Italy (especially the Negroamaro and Primitivo grapes) would also be shipped north to be added to some premium Italian wines, where they also lacked backbone due to a poor harvest.

 

And there were grapes grown in North Africa, from both French and Italian sources and wines from these grapes would also be shipped to the respective countries to be added to wines in poor vintages.

 

So, the wine experts, wine buyers, the collectors and the everyday drinking public were often fooled by this practice and none of them seemed to be able to tell that this had happened – – quite possibly because of the skill of the blender.

 

So it is an imprecise science indeed!

Many wines are blends.  Which vary from year to year depending on the harvest.  Some of the best wines I've had are blends.  I think the big difference is how they are turned into wine.  For example using oak casks instead of stainless steel vats.  I've had some good wines from steel vats, but the best definitely come from being aged in oak casks.

 

http://winefolly.com/review/oaking-wine/

 

Quote

 

The Truth: Oak Makes Wine Taste Better

From the golden hued Chardonnays of Montrachet to first-growth Bordeaux, the most expensive wines in the world are produced with oak aging. This isn’t an opinion, it’s true. The top fifty most expensive wines in the world are oak-aged in some way. Oak is a crucial and often overlooked component in the world of fine wine. Everything from the type, size, age, grain, and treatment of an oak barrel greatly affects the finished wine.

 

 

[xylophone]

1 hour ago, craigt3365 said:

Many wines are blends.  Which vary from year to year depending on the harvest.  Some of the best wines I've had are blends.  I think the big difference is how they are turned into wine.  For example using oak casks instead of stainless steel vats.  I've had some good wines from steel vats, but the best definitely come from being aged in oak casks.

 

http://winefolly.com/review/oaking-wine/

 

 

Sure enough Craig, many wines are blends, including Bordeaux, but my main point was that these wines were blended with grapes which had no business being in that particular wine, yet not even the experts could tell the difference (i.e. Syrah found its way into some Burgundy and Bordeaux wines, for example).

 

Also good to remember that many of the finest Bordeaux (and other wines) are actually fermented in stainless steel vats/tanks and are then racked off and transferred to barrels and it is the oak ageing which makes the difference to a great many wines. At one end of the scale you have those wines which will spend a few months in cask/oak and at the other end you will have Rioja Gran Reserva wines which can spend around three years in oak before they are actually bottled and then they are kept for another three years or so before being released.

 

Then there is the winemaker's trick of adding wooden staves or bags of oak chips to the fermentation process to give the impression of oak in the finished wine, and this is usually done with the cheaper wines and one particular wine which can be found here which uses this technique (I believe) is the Taras wine from Australia which actually says on the bottle, "aged with oak" rather than, "aged in oak", which gives the game away.

 

In the South of France it is still possible to find some winemakers who will use the huge wooden foudres not only for the fermentation of their wines, but also for ageing. This is indeed an area in which you can find concrete fermentation vats, wooden foudres for fermentation and stainless steel tanks, each producing their own particular style of wine.

[craigt3365]

I'm no wine expert, but I do love wine.  I've probably visited vineyards in some 20 or more countries.  I do holidays around visits to vineyards.  LOL

 

The most recent were in Romania, Moldova, Serbia and Bulgaria.  Such fun.  The tour in Moldova was with the actual vintner.  He took us through the whole process and we even got to taste the product at each stage.  Fantastic.  Followed by a drive through the largest underground cellar in the world.  Where we had lunch.

 

Sorry to go off topic.  But it's one of my passions.

[mogandave]

While I can't speak to the quality of the wine, but there are a quite a few vineyards here.


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